Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

“We should be getting back.”

Malemayn looked at him, startled, then looked up the hill toward the bars. “There’s nothing we can do, Raven. Not about them.”

“I know. And we should still get back to work.” Warreven pushed himself away from the Embankment wall, headed down the first set of stairs to cut through the Market, drowning his anger in the familiar noise and smells. The Harbor Market was the largest of Bonemarche’s three market squares—the others were the Glass Market, on the north side of town by the railroad terminus, and the off-worlders’ Souk on the edge of the Startown district—and it was always crowded, even on the edges, the stalls and stone-marked pitches gaudy with goods. Most were local products, foodstuffs, and glass, and silk in skeins and tufts of floss and bolts of dyed and painted cloth; there were a few machine-dealers as well, offering cheap off-world disk-readers and music boxes and card-comps, all at ridiculous prices. The noise of drums cut through the noise of bargaining, and he looked toward the sound to see a woman dancing on the platform where the land-spiders were auctioned at the Quarter-days. It was a good omen, a change of mood, and he started toward it, following the heavy heartbeat of the tonnere - bas and the intricate higher double beat of the counterpoint. He stopped at the edge of the crowd surrounding the platform, looking up at the dancer. Malemayn trailed cheerfully enough in his wake, and said, sounding almost surprised, “She’s good.”

Warreven nodded. The woman—she was definitely a woman—spun and stooped on the raised stage, sunlight flashing from the glass bangles that covered her arms from wrist to elbow. There were glass beads braided into her hair, seemingly thousands of them, in every color; they sparked in the sunlight, and clashed like cymbals as she bent nearly double, hair flying. Her tiered skirts, their hems sewn with still more beads and the occasional bright disk of a metal coin, stood out from her waist as she spun, then collapsed to a twisted cylinder that briefly outlined the long shape of her legs and drew cheers from some of the watching men. The platform at her feet was already littered with flowers and a few coins; the shaal spread out between the two drummers in front of the platform held maybe a fivemeg more in small change. There were a few off-world coins among the scattered seaglass, and more flowers. He cocked his head, seeing the latter, and then the dancer straightened again, and he saw the three parallel lines drawn in white across her cheek. Not just a dancer, then, but a vieuvant , one of the old souls who served God and the spirits, and this was not just a performance, but an offetre , a service to the spirits: she danced for, danced as, the Heart-breaker, the spirit who was spring and lust and all the unruly powers of procreation. The counterpoint drummer wore the same marks on his beardless face.

“She’s very good,” Malemayn said again, and reached into his pocket. He came up with a handful of coins and tossed half dozen onto the shaal with the rest.

“She is,” Warreven agreed, and looked around for a flower seller. He spotted one almost at once—they knew enough to congregate when a vieuvant danced, seemed to come from nowhere—and held up a black quarter-meg. The boy came over eagerly, basket held out in front of him.

“I have ruby-drop, mir, and rosas, and dragon-cor, the Lady likes those—”

Warreven nodded, not really listening, and picked up a spray of the horn-shaped ruby-drops. “How much?”

“A quarter-meg, mir, any coin,” the boy answered promptly. “Picked fresh this morning.”

“Fine.” Warreven handed him the stamped glass disk and turned back to the platform. Above him, the vieuvant was spinning down to the end of this part of the dance, her skirts flaring out into a perfect bell of silk. He tossed the flowers onto the shaal —he had been fond of the Heart-breaker as a child—and followed it with a couple of long-bits and quarter-megs. Malemayn smiled.

“You always get cheated, Raven.”

Warreven returned the smile. It was true enough; he was no hand at haggling. “Only in the market, cousin.”

Malemayn shook his head, still smiling. “It’s a good thing we can afford it. And, speaking of affording things, I thought you wanted to get back to work.”

“I did, I do,” Warreven answered. “I’m coming.”

They threaded their way through the crowds to Harborside where it skirted the Market’s edge. Just beyond the Market it narrowed, becoming little more than an access road for the ware-houses that stood along the waterfront. Warreven wrinkled his nose at the acrid smell of split power cells that seeped from the nearest building and turned up the first side street, into the shade of the low houses. They had been built for the construction crews building the railroad terminus and hadn’t been meant to last much beyond its completion; thirty years later, the poured sandstone walls were crumbling, but the neighborhood was more crowded than ever.

It wasn’t a long walk to the base of Blind Point, where the partnership rented space for their mesnie . It wasn’t a real mesnie , of course—there were only three of them, and none of them was married to any of the others, and besides, Haliday, the third partner, lived two buildings away—but it was easier to call it one than to explain it to the traditional indigenes among their clients. Traditional people had enough trouble sometimes understanding the rules of trade; it was easier to explain if the general setting was at least a little familiar. The building was tall for Blind Point, where the original settlers had built close and low, but relatively narrow; its brick frontage was eroding at the corners, and the door was set into the right-hand corner, to make the inside rooms as large as possible. Warreven scuffed his feet on the stone of the sill and kicked his sandals into the mud tray, no longer aware of the narrowness of the hall. Sunlight was streaming in through the one hand-span window at the far end of the building, throwing a wedge of light across the painted plaster wall. The design of twined doutfire and creeping stars had faded there; the colors were still true by the door, where the light never reached. Warreven made another mental note to find a painter, and pushed open the door to the main room.

It was empty, all the lights switched off to save on power fees, and Malemayn said, from behind him, “Where’s Chattan, then?”

“I thought he’d be waiting,” Warreven answered.

“Raven?” Haliday’s voice came from the inner room. “What the hell is going on?”

Warreven frowned, wondering what 3e was talking about this time, and Malemayn chuckled.

“What have you done now?”

“I don’t know,” Warreven said, quite seriously, and went into the offices.

It was bright, all the lamps lit and the heavy curtains drawn tight against the contrast-destroying sun. They had divided the space into three cubicles when they formed the partnership and moved in, but the gray foam-core walls barely reached Malemayn’s shoulders, so that anyone could see in to the clutter and the bulky computers with their illuminated screens. Haliday stood in the center space, hands on hips, glaring down at one of the three screens that was linked to Bonemarche’s narrowcast networks. Ȝe was wearing off-world clothes, as usual, and as always it gave Warreven a small shock to see the anomaly of 3er body revealed so clearly by the close-fitting fabric. But then, Haliday had always been stubborn that way: 3e had insisted from childhood that 3e was herm, not the boy 3e had seemed to be then, and even now, after 3e had lost 3er case, and been declared legally a woman, 3e refused to answer any pronoun but 3er own.